Quote:
Originally Posted by SpongeG
I am in that age group where the USSR existed while growing up, so any of the countries that were part of it are completely lost on me plus so many have been broken up into different ones or don't even exist anymore. like does Yugoslavia still exist?
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I was born in 1993 so I did my elementary school education from 1997 to 2007. Surprisingly, in my school library we actually had plenty of outdated atlases from the 1970s and 1980s that still had the USSR & the old Eastern Europe in it. I remember looking at maps in the eighth grade--so in 2006 or 2007--getting confused about whether or not Czechoslovakia was a country or not, because some maps in my school had it, others didn't. That was a full 13 years after Czechoslovakia ceased to be a country.
Maybe my school was just really bad at updating resource materials but if my story is anything close to typical there'd actually be a lot of younger people who grew up well after the Fall of Communism who have an outdated map of Eastern Europe in their heads.
As an adult I'm fairly worldly so I keep track of these things but I can see it getting very confusing, especially as Eastern Europe's map didn't stop shifting in 1991. Yugoslavia's breakup didn't complete until 2008, and then just last year, the Czech Republic requested that its actual country name, Czechia, start being used in English. In the Czech language it's always been known as Czechia (
Česko) and comparable terms are common in other European languages (ie.
Tschechien in German,
Tchéquie in French). This bizarre happening stems from the fact that the English language never actually had a word for the Czech homeland; historically we've called it "Bohemia" but that term is technically incorrect as it only refers to part of the country (much like how "Holland" is only one small part of the Netherlands), so when the country became independent in 1993 English language media called it by its full long form name, "Czech Republic" and that caught on throughout the anglosphere.